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Sir Percy Shelley and wife - RLS Website |
 Percy Shelley From Shelley In England: New Facts and Letters from the Shelley-Whitton Press, by Roger Ingpen (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917). "There is that singular story, told by a friend of the family, Miss Blantyre Simpson, of how the late Sir Percy and Lady Shelley both believed that Shelley had been re-born in Robert Louis Stevenson, and how Lady Shelley went so far as to bear a deep resentment against Mrs Stevenson as the mother of the child that ought to have been her own!"
(William Sharp, Literary Geography [London: Offices of the Pall Mall Publications, 1904], p. 33)
Sir Percy Florence Shelley (1819-1889) and Lady Shelley (Jane St John, nee Gibson, 1820-1899) befriended RLS and Fanny when they were living in Bournemouth.
Sir Percy was the son of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and novelist Mary Shelley (1797-1851). In 1844, Sir Shelley became the 3rd Baronet of Castle Goring, Sussex. He enjoyed hobbies like amateur photography and he took photographs of RLS and Skerryvore. In July 1885, Fanny Stevenson wrote about the Shelleys to Sidney Colvin: “Also we are rather intimate with the Shelleys. Lady Shelley is delicious; naturally no longer young, suffering from the effects of a terrible accident that has left her a hopeless invalid, but with all the fire of youth, and as mad as some other people you know, and ready to plunge into any wild extravagance at a moment’s notice. Sir Percy is an odd creature! Do you know him? He is the poet’s son only in being so exceedingly curious. I think we will come to be very fond of him. They have a lovely little theatre at their place here, and give very delightful entertainments, which will be pleasant for us.
They have a bust of Mary Wollstonecraft done from a death mask, over which Louis raves; and justly, for it is the most entrancing thing ever seen” (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol v [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], pp. 120-21).
RLS dedicated The Master of Ballantrae (1889) to the couple: “It is my hope that these surroundings of its manufacture may to some degree find favour for my story with seafarers and sea-lovers like yourselves. And at least here is the dedication from a great way off: written by the loud shores of a subtropical island near upon ten thousand miles from Boscombe Chine and Manor: scenes which rise before me as I write, along with the faces and voices of my friends. Well, I am for the sea once more; no doubt Sir Percy also” (RLS, “Dedication”, Waikiki, 17 May 1889, The Master of Ballantrae [London: Cassell and Co., 1891], p. iii).
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